Mission: Survive
by Growlanser
Summary: Jack Everett is a Navy Seal trying to survive the apocalypse with his young son. What happens when he meets up with the Atlanta survivors; how will he react to the group's hothead? Eventual Slash. OC/Daryl


**Slash(n): **

**Genre of fanfiction involving pairing two male or female characters together.**

Before anything else; Yes, this is SLASH between TWD's character Daryl Dixon and my own character, Jack Everett.

**A/N**: I love TWD! But the gap between now and Season 3 is driving me nuts, so this is how I plan to fill it. I know that people don't really like OC/Main Character pairings, but this is more for my own sanity anyway. Still, I hope someone out there enjoys! This story will be based on my character, Jack Everett, a Navy Seal, and his son. Its focus will be on the relationship between Jack and Daryl Dixon.

**And I don't have a BETA. **T-T So I'm sorry for any mistakes. I wish I had more time to go through and check, but I don't. Please tell me if there's anything you see that I can fix. Thank you!

**Rating: T**, mostly, for strong language and gore. Some future chapter will be rated **M** for sexual themes and/or excessive gore. I'll mark them accordingly.

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A violent tremor shook the tiny fort. A canteen, unsecured to the stacked gear piled on the table, slid forward and tumbled towards him. He caught it with the toe of his boot and sent it careening into the opposite wall. It cracked loudly and reverberated throughout the room before swirling to a stop on floor.

He glanced over his shoulder at the small futon positioned against the corner wall - and to the boy wrapped tightly in its scratchy fleece sheets. From what little moonlight filtered in through the Plexiglass, he could see that the boy hadn't so much as twitched at the rumble or noise. He remained undisturbed.

Jack turned back to the window and watched the distant flashes of angry red light up the night sky. Though it was a clear night, not a single cloud in the sky, a giant green monster was beginning to form around the mainland; a noxious gas cloud that continued to build up and loom over the city. Small flashes of light - which he assumed to be jets catching the light of fire, entered the towering green smoke. They would be dropping almost every available bomb in their arsenal in an attempt to destroy the flesh-eating monsters. Probably suicide missions - he had yet to see a single plane come out.

And of course the boy could sleep; he was the same as those suicide bombers. What were flesh eating monsters to someone who had grown up in a war zone? A cesspool of sickness and evil. To him, these new monsters were nothing but _more_ sick bastards in a world full of sick bastards. At such a young age, the boy already knew a truth that took Jack a few military years to grasp; if you can't sleep just 'cause you're scared of something, then you'll never sleep. There'll always be something to be scared of. You live with it or you die.

Jack smiled, and any onlooker would have immediately noted the bitterness. Even during the chaos of wartime when death loomed over him like an invisible hand, ready to pluck him from action at any moment; even when standing on the very threshold between life and death; _even _when he was standing at the gates of hell and giving the devil himself the finger - he had still always been able to sleep as soundly as a baby. He could just put it all away and shut his body down. Maybe he'd wake up, maybe he wouldn't. It didn't matter so he slept. It had been that simple.

Now he was lucky to catch an hour a night.

It wasn't that he was scared out of his mind - he was, in fact, but that wasn't the reason for the lack of sleep. It wasn't a sense of doom or hopelessness, either - though the situation of being among, for all he knew, the last survivors on God's green, decaying earth didn't exactly inspire much confidence. It wasn't even that he knew the majority of his family were probably dead, and all those things left unsaid would have to remain that way...

No, it was because of the boy. The boy behind him, wrapped up in sheets - his own flesh and blood.

He leaned forward, crossing his arms over the windowpane.

He'd known he was a father, of course. He had to send child support and listen to the kid's mother bitching on the phone at least once a month. He was a father - something he never wanted to be - and he made his peace with that because, as the kid's mother had so often mentioned, there was another man who was the boy's dad. Jack never argued; he preferred it that way.

Fathering a child had been easy. He could only remember slurred pieces - It was his 25th birthday, celebrating his 3rd year as a Seal. Booze, drugs, and girls. They were all over him and one in particular caught his eye.

It was the epitome of wham, bam, thank you, ma'am. 15 minutes tops. He handed her what cash he had in his pockets, grabbed his gun and went back to the barracks. There wasn't even an exchange of names, so how she managed to come across his number 14 months later was beyond him.

At first he denied being the father - he'd been sure to use a rubber, after all. But after she mailed him a picture of the kid, there was really no denying it. Not when they shared identical blue-green eyes. The kid was his.

She had demanded that he come back and take responsibility for them. He had refused, telling her that she could take a running start off the nearest cliff - because she'd sooner flap her arms and fly than see or hear from him again.

He had called back an hour later and agreed to annual child support of $24,000 - the best he could manage, but enough to keep a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs. It was weird at first to know that he had a child that specifically relied on him. But like everything else he grew accustomed to it, sucked it up and got done what needed to be done.

She had sent him a birthday picture each year - maybe to make him feel guilty, or to remind him of his obligation. Many times she would accuse him of throwing them out.

At first he kept them just to prove her big mouth wrong. But he actually kept them long after he grew cold and indifferent to her accusations and bitch fits. He almost always kept the kid's picture on hand - even at that moment, he could trace the outline of the small, rectangular photo in his back pocket. The current one was of the boy's 5th birthday, the red frosting of a cupcake on his lips and nose. He looked so familiar -Jack could see himself in the picture - especially the way the light of the camera hit his eyes. So much like his own. On the back she had him write his own name. "Abel".

He was never really sure why he kept them - but it never really mattered. He had his duties and he fufilled them - both to his country, and to the boy and his mother. It was easy being a father.

But _now_...

He had to be a _dad_?

He turned around to look at the sleeping child. If he went by what he knew being a "dad" entailed, he'd have left the kid to die alongside his mother and hopped on the first plane to anywhere-else. That's what his own father would've done. That's what his father's father would've done.

With a sigh, he fell back onto his own futon where he had long since abandoned the itchy sheets, opting instead for the filthy mattress and a jacket for a pillow.

He couldn't be expected to raise the child. He could care for him, sure, and make sure nothing hurt him. Those were things he had learned to do while in the military. But to talk to him or to say... _fatherly_ things to him, like in the movies; he couldn't be expected to do that. He didn't know how to do any of that Kodak moment shit.

The fort shook again, and giant clumps of dust fell from the ceiling.

What he _did _know was that they couldn't stay in the fort much longer. After a week, their supplies were dangerously low and worse still, the cloud of noxious gas was looming ever closer. He'd have to get them out of there - soon.

And if he was being honest - he'd rather take on the problem of surviving through an apocolypse then surviving fatherhood.

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There ya have it - the prologue. The story really begins next chapter. Daryl Dixon will be there. ^-^


End file.
